Let me ask you a question, but first, pick something, perhaps something you might be good at:

“What does it take to be good at that?”

Okay, you probably have a good idea of what you need to do, but let me rephrase that question:

“What does it take to be the BEST at that?”

Is your answer the same? I think we very often have an idea of how to be successful at something, but that is not usually defined very well. Neither are certain things. “Happiness” comes to mind. We settle for being happy, but never to be the happiest. Wouldn’t that be an interesting concept?

So this takes us to my next dilemma: to find the best, do we take a top down approach, or a bottom up approach? This question haunts me as well. I often consider the problem with deliberate practice is that there needs to be somewhat of a direction to know what you want to achieve. For example, I can deliberate practice certain skills to master, but if I only need to use those skills 5% of the time, I would be an expert at something required only 5% of the time. Not knowing what is needed can be very difficult. Knowing where you are is one thing, but knowing where you need to go is often the hard part. Again, being successful gives an idea of where to go, but being the best at something also needs precision.

This takes us back to the problem. I originally wanted to look at talent identification and talent development to inform the base of a podium pathway for my sport, but that would be a bottom up approach. The reverse would be to create the podium pathway first, but from the top down approach. This would likely refer to figuring out what is needed to succeed at the highest levels, which would then create a pathway.

Is this the same in different industries? For example, if we followed the educational pathway where we did our 12-13 years of primary & secondary school, then our post-secondary studies, then graduate studies, is that the fastest way? The system exists, but the best people often find a way to accelerate through the system. Following the system will produce people that are successful, but what about those who are the best? Do the best musicians end up skipping grades in music and do their own projects? If we studied the outliers, wouldn’t that be a better indication of what kind of pathway is required to be the best? Isn’t the best often an outlier?

Unfortunately, it will always need to be updated, because once enough people follow a similar process, it becomes common, and therefore there are no competitive advantages. Being different should be celebrated because when you are the best, you are different from the rest. Arguably, the easiest thing to do is to be in the middle; it would take incredible effort (or bad luck) to be the worst.

So now my mind is spinning again: what does it take to be the best? Using Gold Medal Profile attributes, I have to start thinking again:

• Is there a maximum on physiological abilities for your sport where returns would be diminishing? For badminton, I think there is.
• Is there a maximum on technical abilities for your sport where returns would be diminishing? For badminton, I also think there is.
• How about psychological and tactical attributes?

The problem is that when we want to be the best at something, it is largely unique to a particular sport, and even an event perhaps in that sport. I would be similar to that in education, where it would be different levels of expertise required for math vs. music.

Maybe the best way to do it is if I was programming a robot to compete in badminton, what attributes would I give it?

• Physiological: I would give my robot enough fuel to last the longest recorded match based on the event, with maybe an additional 10-20% gap. Sometimes players may be so fit that they lose before they get tired.
• Technical: I would give my robot the ability to return any shot they can reach. The concept is that if you can touch the shuttle with your racquet, it should be able to be returned.
• Psychological: Based on robots generally not understanding emotion, my robot would not have any either. Booing the robot or any bad calls would not influence the robot at all. There is no way of getting the robot angry.
• Tactical: I would program the robot with up to three shot sequencing, based on the general patterns found in badminton. This gets technical, but I’ll do my best to explain. As badminton is a sport that is turn based (i.e. I hit, then you hit, then repeat until someone wins or makes a mistake), there should be sequences of probabilities of where to hit, which is closely tied to technical skills. Basically, tactics is where you want to hit, and technical is the probability that you will hit the shot you want to hit. Good technical skills (i.e. 99%) of the time, with good tactics (hitting the right shot, at the right time), often leads to winning a rally when on offense, or the ability to neutralize your opponent’s attacking rally. There is a good chance of being able to mathematically calculating the odds, and though a lot is based on experience for most players, if it can be programmed into a robot that never forgets, or has the ability to update the model over time with the input of more information (literally, machine learning), then the robot knows exactly what to do in all situations.

But there’s always that chance factor, so my robot would be extremely good at badminton, but not invincible.

So now, if we need to teach a human instead, there is a lot to learn, but if they could do exactly as the robot, we would more or less have our Gold Medal Profile. The rest of the work would be extrapolating the pathway that leads to this ability, and estimating where the athlete would be on a Performance Results Track. Then for Talent Identification/Development, we would identify the attributes that would need to be maximized. Too often, talent identification and development seems to be based on physical abilities. Given an equal weighting to all the components of a GMP, that would only amount to 25%, which would be unlikely to indicate whether an athlete will be successful in the future or not.

Reflection Questions:

• What is the difference to you in “success” and being “the best”?
• If you could program a robot based on GMP parameters (technical, tactical, psychological, physiological) to be the best in the world, what would they look like?
• How much do you think chance/luck plays in your model?
• And most importantly, if you had to choose, would you choose bottom-up, or top-down?

Thank you for reading!